You can buy a 1960s car ad and hang it on the wall as art but, says Conor Pope, today's variety is very different. . .
A man with a well groomed goatee looks up from his easel at his smiling and considerably more formally turned out family. He wears his trousers rolled fashionably high, and his sockless air of bonhomie contrasts starkly with the bow tie and suit his 10-year-old son has chosen - rather foolishly - for this sunny day out at the beach.
The incongruity of the father and son's attire is unimportant, however. What really matters is the family are happy because they own - or at the very least are standing beside - a Ford Zodiac.
This brightly coloured, beautifully rendered and decidedly kitsch poster was born to hang in a French Ford showroom in the early 1960s, when the Zodiac was a sure sign of sophistication. The showroom may be gone now. The car certainly is but, improbably, the poster lives on and is currently for sale in a vintage poster gallery in Dublin.
And while, at €100, it may not cost more than the car it once advertised, it is closing the price gap fast. It is just one of a number of vintage car posters Gallery 29 on Dublin's Molesworth St is selling at prices ranging from €100 to over €500. It's hard to imagine prints from current car advertising campaigns, commanding such prices, never mind the €20,000 or more you'd have to shell out for original art deco prints advertising 1920s Mercs.
The difference between selling then and now is striking. A quick flick through most glossy magazines suggests a utilitarian, uniform approach. Advertising in the 21st century has little need for smartly dressed, smiling families enjoying a day out. Goatee beards have been left behind as modern day advertisers eschew facial hair in favour of hairpin turns. Beautiful painting has been replaced by beautiful backlighting.
"Quite apart from the product, advertising has moved on and styles have changed. Graphic art has moved on, production qualities have moved on," says Anthony Neville, marketing manager of Jaguar in Ireland.
The amazing looking photographs that adorn the glossy magazines don't come cheap. A promotional picture can cost up to €100,000 to produce, says Neville and can take days to take. And is it a price worth paying? Of this Neville has little doubt. "Some of them are works of art. They really are superb."
While the ads of today are expensively illuminated they are, it could be argued, a little dull. Perhaps it is because they have so much to do. First, there has to be brand reinforcement, then a specific image has to be sold to get people to associate certain sub-conscious feelings with the product - SUV ads, for instance, try to reach wannabe surfers and outdoorsy types who imagine that if they buy the car, they will get the lifestyle. Then, on a more mundane level, the ad has to grind out its bread and butter task of "moving metal". Here's the car. Here's the spec. Buy it.
The amount of money spent on car advertising globally each year is enough to fund several mid-sized countries quite comfortably.According to figures from the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland, the total car advertising spend in the Republic last year was €36.8 million. This figure is small beer when compared to Britain where £678million, or about a billion euro, was spent last year. But it is in the US where the big budgets lie. Three of the top five advertisers in the US sell cars.
General Motors had the biggest spend last year, splashing out a staggering $2.5 billion on promoting their products. Damlier Chrysler and Ford weren't far behind with budgets of $1.8 and $1.5 billion, respectively.
The huge budgets, high spec photography and glossy prints didn't exist five decades ago, so most of the vintage posters like the ones displayed in Gallery 29 were hand-painted and visible only in showrooms, according to gallery owner John Rogers. They are striking - whether or not they were successful is hard to tell. They certainly wouldn't work now.
But then, as Neville points out, "people are so much more sophisticated and are expecting different things from ads." There is an "incredible barrage" of advertising. There are ads on toilet walls, on petrol pump handles, on the back of till receipts. "It is at you everywhere and to get anything to stand out is very difficult." While hand-painted kitsch might look good, it would be totally lost in today's blizzard of ads.
In the 1920s and 1930s advertising was geared toward expanding the mass market for the emerging technology of the motor car. In post-war America the message changed, and it was no longer sufficient to emphasise a car's ability to get you where you wanted to go. Suddenly advertising was selling not only wheels but also the notion that the right set would satisfy human "needs" and "wants". The car, at least in its advertising, had become - and remains - something (perhaps the only thing) which could satisfy a buyer's deep desires and dreams. In the Sixties ads became more suggestive. "Cadillac Ladies Love to Play...Chauffeur" reads another poster available to eBay buyers. "This one is really fun to drive," it continues, with a gentle nod and a wink.
Rogers started collecting his vintage posters five years ago while living in the US. He opened Gallery 29 last November and although he has just five or six car ads in stock at present he will seek out posters for particular cars, as long as the requests aren't too outlandish.
He acquires his wares from auctions and other art dealers and he travels regularly to France. But who, in their right mind would spend €500 on a poster, you have to wonder. "You'd be surprised," he says. The prints which tend to sell well are those steeped in nostalgia. Garish John Hind-type images that evoke a certain era or have a certain kitsch factor, have a longer shelf life.
It's hard to imagine what car ads currently on display will attract the collectors of the future. "The design-driven ones will always sell better than the mass produced rather boring photographic imagery. But you know what," Rogers notes, "It is probably the ones that are the most tacky and evocative."
Neville is less confident a legacy will be left behind by this generation of car advertisers. "In those days, the way to advertise was with the showroom poster but now advertising appears on television, in magazines and online. Such advertising is not as immediately capturable."
The posters of the 1940s can be framed, the posters used on billboards today can not, unless you have a spectacularly big house.